The present invention relates to complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) structures, and more specifically, to a semiconductor structure that incorporates a capacitor within the structure for reducing the soft error rate (SER) of a circuit.
Soft errors are a problem for bistables such as latches and cross-coupled sense amplifiers in memory devices, for example. These errors occur due to noise, for example, which causes information to be loss without damage to the circuit. Existing methods for mitigating soft errors tend to add area and delay arising from the addition of devices or capacitance added to harden the circuit. The minimum charge required to cause a soft error is known as a critical charge, Qcrit. As Qcrit decreases, the SER increases and vice versa. The additional devices and capacitance increase Qcrit, however at substantial manufacturing costs.